


Act 3 [Or what if George of Clarence survived the Tower AU]

by Lady_Plantagenet



Series: These Giddy Hatchings [3]
Category: 15th Century CE RPF, Richard III - Shakespeare, The Sunne in Splendour - Sharon Kay Penman, The White Queen (TV)
Genre: All previous tags apply, Bastard Feudalism Issues, F/M, Fortune’s Wheel, Gen, If you have gotten this far you seriously deserve a medal, Medieval Cultural References, Medieval Literary References, No Magic Though - I Promise!, Now to who does the archive warning apply? Dun Dun Dunnnnnn, Peace At Last?, Prophecy, Succession Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 14:35:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28512030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Plantagenet/pseuds/Lady_Plantagenet
Summary: [ENTER: Three Queens: one a curse-master, one yet to take up the art, the third still fresh-faced, life not having gotten to her yet, also; an anxious young king at the precepts of an uncertain future and a coronation built on dreams of old]
Relationships: Elizabeth Woodville & Anthony Woodville 2nd Earl Rivers, Elizabeth Woodville & Marguerite d’Anjou | Margaret of Anjou, George Plantagenet Duke of Clarence & Anthony Woodville 2nd Earl Rivers, George Plantagenet Duke of Clarence & Elizabeth Woodville, George Plantagenet Duke of Clarence & Henry Stafford Duke of Buckingham, George Plantagenet Duke of Clarence & Marguerite d’Anjou | Margaret of Anjou, George Plantagenet Duke of Clarence & Richard III, Isabel Neville/George Plantagenet Duke of Clarence
Series: These Giddy Hatchings [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2088273
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3
Collections: Histories Ficathon XI





	Act 3 [Or what if George of Clarence survived the Tower AU]

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheGoldenGhost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGoldenGhost/gifts).



[SCENE 1]

Gloucester died bravely, George thought in an unguarded moment. With his dark head drooped, hands outstretched like on a cross, in life, his body had never looked straighter. It led his brother to wonder if it would stay that way in death. It was the smallest reconciliation nature could have offered him, however past its time. 

The beheading had conjured the queerest of congregations. Jewelled figures speckled the open space they called Tower Green. No one’s robes were black as the wet morning had them made with each drizzling slap. Each one held to their colours: Buckingham to a grayne deeper for all the crimson dye now afforded to him, Rivers an emerald that drew with the vitality of the tree sap, but at the end, the spectators turned points of ermine, shaking with the ground turned white. Somewhere in the breath of time between the clang of the prime bell and Gloucester being led forward, George thought to his left. Perchance it was a blessing that Isabel was not in attendance, for never before had a single tract of land had to withstand three queens, side by side for one man’s demise. 

What York’s dowager queen thought she knew, Lancaster’s kept to her breast. The boys were smuggled to Ireland knowing a mercy Margaret’s own did not. The messenger had doled out the details of her sons’ murders with a starling’s sagacity. He told of their purpled throats, crushed ridges where Elizabeth had tried to stay him long before he had dared to speak of how tears had made valleys of the skin of their cheeks. She had bawled, near strangled the messenger. How did Brackenbury get hold of the Lord Protector’s instructions? She could hear her think, did a man as friendless as Gloucester truly think he would become king? What Elizabeth yearned to know would ever elude her. 

In the room across, Margaret had given silent thanks for the dumbness that saw George’s former page throughout. God knew how the man had been paid, though the whimper of gold she caught through her keyhole belied much of the truth. Landless as he once was, Clarence must have melted coin from his store of rings. By the hour of the crashing sounds started, Margaret had grown back into her spite. The false queen had no right to that noise, what little Margaret was entitled, she believed rightly her entitlement alone. 

If she- had she shouldered herself past the York queen’s attendants, proving herself more unbecoming in banishment than she had ever been in war, grabbed her with the same words that she had once wrangled into curses, but only to this time turn of the dagger a sugary poison... What a joyous thought to dip into her bitterness! Sorrow once again all hers, in history at least if not a mellow for this life. Elizabeth, proud and fair, a mind she would see run in the hells of anger and dashed hopes if it meant Margaret could preside alone over her empty plains. Grief and lost hopes were constant, the longing for a son dead a gnaw to the empty heart, not one that shifts along with the leaves at every flittering breeze. 

Now at the beheading, she saw how the hoare thawed under her skirts, and holding out a palm to the hot rain she let out a sigh of relief that she had not acted, not let her nerves dictate her as they once did. For where else would Clarence have drawn out the Woodville affinity and its zeal for revenge? The tale of the princes’ death bred rebellions that beget ten others in their wake, and Margaret had not parted with one chattel, not spared one man to witness this loveliest of sights to her heart’s content. 

As the executioner stroked his axe on Gloucester’s stout neck, Margaret hoped he would miss, ten attempted hacks for each wound she had counted on her son’s corpse. Alas, Clarence proved not as vicious as she had hoped. Mayhaps she had erred in not telling him of what death the crookback had envisioned for him, the butt of Malmsey. A suffocation like the one he fictioned for the princes but that much unholier. She knew, for hardy where the ears of for those for whom the silence of the Tower was their custom. Now, she heard two thuds. All had left after Gloucester with Buckingham tarrying with the Queen for Brackenbury’s beheading. The block grew bloodier by Lovell’s turn, the rain unable to wash it anew in time. By then, only her and George remained. 

Too long must she have lingered mute, for turning behind towards the Beauchamp Tower, she saw George and a look of impatience. He was calling to her from the gate looking more petulant than aggrieved, with nothing of the same stain of melancholy that had danced in his hazel eyes the happier french hours of years past.

He had gone inside before she reached him. ‘Have him buried with his Duchess at York Minster’ she heard him say to the two men who had passed her coming in ‘have my mother see to the arrangements, she bore no illusions of his nobility, her spending will be just’

The coronation was next morrow, not to be trumped by any grief ceremonies with its plangent shows. How the snow was already melting.

‘You see madame’ his said, his voice adopting a greater significance ‘How I have not extended the honour of a Tewksbury burial to none but your son’ he held the door to the tower’s presence chamber for her awkwardly, by his fingers as though one would be withdrawn for each split-second that his courtliness would be put to test. She had suspected her recognition, once more, of him as his father’s heir had bare flushed out his disdains. 

She knelt at that gratitude like she had seen many others now do in silence, as homage now seemed due for every nicety. He portrayed a poor show of peace, but it stirred not a moment of pause in her. Gloucester was slain, but no readeption act could carve out the white from this rose of york. The blood it marks, putrid, she thought, beating and moving through the diphtheric heart like a maggot. 

Margaret, twice queen, once widow had nothing but a fraught gasp for the girl she had once called daughter, peace found her bereft ‘perished from hearing tales of her husband’s horrors?’

They sat on adorned chaisses around a table, finery it seemed, she was also indifferent to, but where the morning light mingled with the candle, the pinkness of her dress’ wool made her that much warmer. George nodded spilling her a cup of wine ‘Aye madame’. This one, darker and sweeter than any thing bred below the heavens. She drank it gladly, swilling it as the swish of her sleeve cut like a cloth of flame through the stony air.

‘The gloom shrouded her while she was praying, or so the abbot tells me’ 

‘As you are now heir of Lancaster, prithee consider Lady Stanley’s plea?’ she sat her maizer down. 

‘The honour of Richmond for her son?’ beneath the table, he was knocking his shoes’ blued pikes. He appeared rather more distracted by this play-conflict of his doing. ‘Madame, why? We have said how my noble father and others of York had erred, not only in granting precedence to the female line against Edward III’s wishes, but by according the honours of succession to those bastard-born of our line. Need we enliven doubt by granting the Tudor boy a royal honour, especially one that had been mine?’

Tiredly, she set her elbows on the table, hoping it would not turn to picking splinters. ‘It is your duty as the uniter to redress the wrongs wrought on every man York or Lancaster’ she packed some of the cheese, though quelling her hunger had never done much to restrain her voice ‘One need only hear of the life of strife of the uprooted Pembroke. An uncle and nephew hounded for the precepts of Europe. But was not my own Edward a child who knew not an unshifting home. Would not the life of yours have followed suit but for our enterprise?’

As he laughed, a sardonic glimmer winked in his features ‘I would hear all the tales of all the uncle Jaspers from Dublin to Jerusalem if he only return thence. Indeed my coronation is to proceed anon and wherefore the absences of all who would exalt my kingship, King Louis? Your sister Lady Yolande? Louis of Orléans? I had entrusted you with the gravest of secrets. And oh, so that I may once again make of these men a band of friendship’

A runaway notion passed Margaret briefly, flickering in gravity: what of her namesake the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy? She stood to leave, and then stopped. What other developments had this York not told her of? She hastily excused herself, shooting back up. He looked at her curiously when she made way to the door, they exchanging a confused mirror of backward looks. 

George left shortly after, shrugging off the worry with the cold. Buckingham may have been a fool, not for that she was dangerous, but a woman of delusions, simpled by madness and ally-less. Certes, she would have her seat at his enthronement, but naught else, ever, but a touch of pity. Was it not, he thought, the flower of chivalry to defend the weak and witless? The notion came over him pleasantly, perchance the courtly bloom had not fled him after all. Around him grey stone was sleek with entrappeds’ tears, he absorbed the cloistered sadness and how he among them would be the only king with whom his own had ever mingled. There would be hangings. Gold would do, he thought, gold for the heavens, for a king and a court within it and for all its glorious notions. But for now, there at the end of the white tower lay the single room ladden with all his joys, his lady and their children: Margaret a tiny grand dame in the making and Edward, a golden prince, fitted in the fabrics in which the great Warwick had always intended them garbed, and now him too, so decorated by this legacy from beyond the grave. The age of the ambitioned and crooked, the indulgent and lax would now be put from the glorious tapestries of the ages past, like the dust that would gather to be brushed off before a shroud would form.

  
  


* * *

  
  


[SCENE 2]

A day later, there it was. His glorious tapestry. Threaded from a procession of the streets to the dias where all narrowed,he had his men busy about London all morning, distributing roses red as the cock’s comb and white as swansdown. Edges of the merchants’ houses, were lain with the green of the Clarence livery, growing proudly with the tufts of grass that rimmed their window sills for a spring that, in but a day, prevailed over the chill. The morning was death’s, but life teamed all around them in screams and cheers, he wanted to follow them, turning around often enough to confuse his mare’s trot. He then thought on how all England would be thus like a garden, sprouting from Westminster in shoots. His garden, from whom, the cold, the silence and the discontent, he would banish. 

Isabel was gleaming with a quietude by his side, striking the folios of the liber regalis to shame with the small but satisfied smile that curled upon her lips. She let her gaze lower, as though guided by some spiritual instinct to him. He found himself enchanted. Caxton, George knew would not forget his old patron. He had him fixed in the tableaux: stood before him scribbling the image of them into his mind, verses would be unfurled about the first King George, the ilk of England’s saint and Queen Isabel with the blood of Guy de Warwick roaring in her veins: the queenly forebearer of St George’s heirs. His head flickered with his first order: The Games and Playes of Chesse, would be reprinted with an illustration of their crowning, for should not the readers have their relief, knowing the work’s donee, for one fate had defended? King George, made worthier by his love of the common weal, he who had vanquished a board with with not one queen surrendered. The pawns.. His mouth hardened, he would have masses said for his men lost in rebellion. The fall was heavier than in Edgecote Moor. 

His mind was throttled to his first real order. He would not let it, he tilted his chin up to the sky, allowing the slicing sound from the morning to melt with the sounds of the activity around them. What he beheld was that richer of a blue, nearing more to the Virgin’s that hued his boyhood. So taken was he that he dared wonder at the expanse, visions of bottomless waters and black pits shirked beyond recall. ‘À Warwick!’ he heard to his surprise between trumpet blares.

The procession was now pressing past Dowgate Street, he had ordered it stay South of Saint Mary Bothaw. The deeper they advanced onto Elbow Lane the more the ‘À Warwick!’ cry picked up by the multitudes, a few feeding ‘À Clarence’s to the evergrowing choir. By the time the procession had reached L’Érber, the chants bent off its roof and Isabel shed a tear for the damson cobbles, near weeping just before the turning at Bush Lane when some woman, held up with straining hands, her child. It was the straggling babe of seven winters past, for whom her father had given bread that Christmas and thereafter. 

However, when George looked behind them, the sound still whirled with the colour but seemingly none to the liking of Rivers, Margaret of Anjou and the others. Their grimaces sharpened George back into focus, and only then had he noticed the red had faded long ago, the white too, all becoming overpowered by the green. Unmistakable for Rivers’ colours, too bright was it to be anything but that of Clarence livery. But was not green common in both roses red and white? For what would they be for the stem that held them? ‘Baseless suspicions’ he dismissed them as, unwelcome to the warmth of day. Yet, still, he tugged at his reins.

‘Fie our people, good citizens’ he called out to all ‘Know you not it is not Clare that we honour to-day? We rejoice for the crown, a destiny helped onto my head by the barons before you! Be of good cheer too for the avenged mothers of Lancaster and York, for whom god’s justice smiled upon, and he shall do unto you all in his mercy as he did to sanctify this rule!’ 

He strode on forward, passing the rest throwing their felicitations and grumbles to the cheers. No matter, for soon the young King and Queen shortly entered the Abbey. ‘The sun and moon’ they were called, although no sunlight was rushing, gathering about his head. Only three and twenty, but his hair’s childhood tawn had long darkened into that of his brothers’ casts, one the king and the other the traitor. Isabel, as she ever was, rose to the dias in muffled steps, black hair splaying like a second mantle. When they had knelt behind hands clasped in prayer, it fell over her face, soft as swansdown.

His shoulders dropped when they put the crown on his head, hers had still remained remained square. Yet later, at Westminster Hall, she danced with a gaiety George thought had frozen for the time they were wed. Before long, he hankered, just as he had in Calais, for her, to possess her with all the impatient eagerness of a newlywed. Standing up, he chided himself for the sprightliness suddenly immured within him, for layed back in the confessors’ chair, he caught himself musing on all the ways he would have her later that night. The banners wept above the hall in a draft conjured by those dancing, England’s heart beating proudly from under the Red Cross of St George, the only of his old banners he did not have to discard with the title: Clarence. 

Back down, he had just noticed his nieces fanned out in perfect symmetry, an elaborate lace of gold besides their other uncle. As always, Earl Rivers appeared with his sister in tow, but George had no Edward to give to him, compliment the display that could have crafted.

‘A moment your grace if I may’ homage was paid a second time in Anthony‘s voice. Better yet for such a request: ‘Charles le Téméraire’s heiress, her hand for my brother?’ It was the dowager Queen who spoke. 

George grumbled, shaking his head in that prolonged way always known of kings. ‘Such talk at a coronation?’ His disdain spread into an uneasy smile for the eldest, Elizabeth, who he had come to notice had all her father’s easy charm, the other sisters did not follow by example, neither smiling nor frowning. Her marriage arrangements would spell many headaches for him, was a realisation he had just come into. Such alliances were often a queen’s domain, and so, what balm could Isabel, manor educated and good at rearing accounts lay, work into this particular entanglement? Never since Queen Maud’s time had there ever been such a question of succession. It had been said now as then: the lawyers and statesmen of old had erred where that was concerned, all the same, would it go with a woman, just as it came with one? 

‘Your grace, surely, you have heard that the universal spider is looking to have her for his son. Burgundy would one day subsume into fiefdom to France’ Anthony said organising his plea eloquently ‘England’s eternal alliance snipped in the bud’

It seemed only moments ago, daylight had flashed through the hall, that lancet windows had ribboned into beautiful florid streaks so they may all amuse themselves. Now, George looked back up at Rivers and his words, and night had fallen with all the fickleness of fortune’s wheel. Age dawned on him in these fickle March hours, for never had he attended a banquet where he was that one trapped in his seat. Where it was not Rivers, it was Buckingham and he had only been the second of the supplicants. George would wear this new station like a chain, but where goes the humours of a man’s coronation when he had built it on promises of assurances for baronial power? This duty, who Warwick had melded into his own stubborn blood, George knew would see years of tire before he could do likewise unto his own.

George wondered if he had been bred of the same ilk as Edward, the curse of the inactive disposition. Now that fear had long fled his energies, how he wished to have shaken Rivers with: ‘by your leave, go and be done with it, marry the heiress of Burgundy and leave me to my peace’. If only the princes were elsewhere...‘Why my lord would the Duchess Mary have you for her troth? By my admittance you are most noble in character, but the Burgundians reason differently than us English’ he turned his tone to even greater gentleness for the last, had his tongue not forgotten the courtier drawl, the inflexion would not have come out so stringily ‘The old valois arrogance has not weeded out. I would not risk paying insult to the noble lady or my sister the dowager duchess, but unto you I will give a most magnificent bride when I am to find one in England. For my dear lord Rivers, we have great need of you here’. It had been a good idea, that of yoking Burgundy to England once more. If only he could wed the girl to Buckingham. For Buckingham knew.

His sister Elizabeth led him away by a simple touch of the arm which she seemed to believe would minister all unwise words. Edward mayhaps, but in truth, the Earl did not seem to have any for George. As they stepped away to their sister of Buckingham, he noticed her nails were jagged at the edges, even more when she dug into her brother’s blue sleeves. How her torn cuticles rolled in his sight. Were we not brothers of chivalry? George thought sadly, I at the heal judging the rules, you below at the melee with the bastard of Burgundy. Was I not the one who held your helmet?

But am I also not the one who had you believe your nephews slain? 

Margaret would have gladly enfolded Rivers and made from a friend, a son-in-law. She bore the same lack of care, as Edward did, when it came to rank. The pious man, bereft of worldly means, courage and piety; the only makers of his dowry. Marshal Boucicaut they all could play, a role open to all but him. 

He sank into the confessor’s chair, frozen and watching the revelries like some old King Arthur where he had known himself as Gawain. The same concerns prevailed like reccuring clouds in a confused summer sky. Had the princes gotten from Ireland to his sister in Burgundy? He bent over, toying with his garter, turning it around the leg that yearned to dance. The Carola began playing and his hazel eyes lept with the circles, gathering the florid colours into a bouquet of buoyancy. 

Isabel was a pale mark in her cloth of silver, she looked up at him and in that second her smile dropped, but her hand remained linked into the revelry. Warwick’s daughter was spinning dutifully and the music had dropped the tones which made him happiest when they were played to him when she had first become his Duchess. Calais. The place cropped up as a question to him. Had the Irish lords entrusted with the princes been discreet when passing the channel? The cinque ports pirates were famed for their ferociousness. What of when his nephews would stretch into men as wilful and wretched as him and his bretheren were? Would sons of York gladly keep to their dowdy schoolrooms and church cloisters? He sank even deeper into the cushions, letting the cloth of gold crumple with his weight. He knew not if they would, but were ever his spirits higher than his chances. They would be kept to their vows, he coaxed to himself, Margaret would find the alcove of Burgundian churches and instill onto them the authority of the Bishop of Cumbrai, compound with her draconian will if need be. He peered into the maizer laid out to his left before drinking, reminding himself that it had all been spelled in the stars. G would prevail over E. The Malmsey bubbled as if in response, and in its red liquid he beheld the fine straight nose, full lips and large hazel eyes which gentler days had seen, while the future snapped and burned about him.

**Author's Note:**

> “For if wee thinke that prophecyes be true,  
> We must beleue it cannot but betyde,  
> Which God in them foresheweth shall ensue,  
> For his decrees vnchanged doe abide:  
> Which to be true my bretheren both haue tryed,  
> Whose wicked warkes warne princes to detest,  
> That other’s harmes may keepe them better blest”
> 
> \- ibid. poem.


End file.
